This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 30, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The power to make war is a power that is reserved to Congress.

But today, Congress has handed much of the war power to the executive branch.

Republican U.S. Representative Warren Davidson is working with fellow members of the U.S. House

to reassert congressional prerogatives on war, trade, regulation, and other areas where the White House has taken

more control, either unilaterally or with congressional acquiescence.

We spoke earlier this month.

I watched a video that you participated in of a committee hearing that was put online by Congresswoman

Barbara Lee.

What really struck me about the discussion that you had with

representatives Amash and Massey and Representative Lee was really just how you're trying to get to an agreement here on something that is pretty basic,

which is getting Congress to do its constitutional duty with respect to asserting its own authority.

Absolutely and in that case specific to warmaking, which was one of the most basic premises and it's been highlighted on a couple other topics recently. It's a big part of why I chose to get out of the army and

You know, it's addressed in Federalist 69 pretty pretty cleanly

How do we get Congress to care about this. It seems that not just war, but with all manner of areas

where Congress should be the one making the rules and deciding what those rules actually mean.

They've delegated so much of that to the executive branch.

Yeah, absolutely.

Just tariffs, that's in the news recently. All kinds of things that we could talk about, but the trend is Congress really doesn't like to vote. They like avoiding voting. And the Senate is even worse than the House on avoiding voting and you know

what Congress cares about is popularity with the public and they're not going to care about it until the public cares

about it. And you know Ben Franklin famously said as he's walking out of the

...